Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are all included in the surveillance sweep, and all the updates posted to any one of these popular services will be uploaded to one single database available all day, every day to police.

Four state attorneys general are in federal court today in a last ditch effort to block the Obama-UN scheme to transfer of a key part of the Internet architecture to a unaccountable global organization.

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October 1 is D-Day for the start of the international takeover of the Internet, a scheme the Obama administration and the United Nations have been advancing for years. Why are GOP leaders AWOL as President Obama and the United Nations move to transfer critically important jurisdiction over the Internet to an unaccountable UN-aligned monopoly? Why are Ryan and McConnell doing nothing?

With Obama illegally plotting to hand over a crucial piece of the Internet's architecture to a United Nations-style outfit before he leaves office — and potentially kill Internet freedom as we know it — Republicans in Congress are fighting back. Among other serious concerns, lawmakers have been warning that giving up control of ICANN, which manages the assignment of website domains, could open the door to Internet censorship by the UN and its oftentimes totalitarian governments. Other critics have warned of potential international taxes levied by UN agencies. But with the White House aiming to complete the surrender by September 31, a growing coalition of liberty-minded GOP lawmakers are working to derail the controversial administration effort.

The establishment's false narratives about the world are imploding in spectacular fashion thanks to the Internet, and the establishment's propagandists are increasingly being called out for their deception. That has the establishment extremely upset. So upset, in fact, that establishment propagandists and the federal government are busy demonizing online freedom and concocting ways to clamp down on voices that expose the false narratives. But Americans can stop it.

As if the issues of an ill-informed electorate, media smear campaigns, and partisan politics weren’t enough to make elections difficult affairs, there is a not-so-new twist in the plot that will — at the very least — undermine many informed voters’ confidence in the system. Enter — from somewhere hidden offstage — the hackers who may well have more control over the outcome of November than any voting bloc could hope for.

Legislators can pass laws requiring background checks and putting undesirables onto “no fly, no buy” lists all day long. But they will have precious little impact when people have the freedom to purchase the increasingly sophisticated hardware and software to make their own weapons at home.

George Orwell may have imagined a world of total surveillance, but even his fertile imagination and acute understanding of totalitarianism did not foresee a world where the citizens demand, purchase, install, and configure devices to conduct the bulk of the surveillance on themselves and others. He also did not foresee the incestuous — if sometimes less-than-harmonious — relationship between government and business that would bring about the surveillance state. In the digital age, we have a state of total (or near total) surveillance that makes 1984 look like child’s play.